Greed (3 page)

And we don't even want to start on about the clearing-up operations after the mudslide last autumn, we really must draw a line under this chapter, although we're still so stuck to it. Even the police cadets spent five days helping out then, to say nothing of the tons of hair in the ground, which no one has yet been able to explain. For that we had to bring in units of the Federal Army, didn't we? After last year's fire the plots of land are once again firmly in the hands of our bank. Those are no grounds to be against the banks or the Jews, although that's a fine tradition hereabouts, there's simply no ground that belongs to anyone else, that's it. Small cause, big effect, as NATO always said about the Kosovo War. Just imagine, there are even people who want to open a DIY superstore in the darkest and most inaccessible hills of the Bucklige Welt in Lower Austria, you wouldn't believe it, while huge loads whizz past them with a whistling slipstream and straight over the southern or eastern border where there are people living whom one despises, whose language one doesn't speak, whose laws one doesn't know, but where everything costs exactly half, which usefully one had already saved up. For dessert one can eat and booze really well and go to the hairdresser for the same money you pay for a couple of rolls here. The people on the other side of the border, who were rotting alive for too long in a gloomy state, don't yet know how one has to do business and our light will take a couple of light years yet until it has reached them. So they do their own business, which is also already quite effective and even fills up gas tanks until they burst. Our bank however already knows it all in advance, it inspects the new house which reminds it of every other one which already exists, except that it's already falling apart while people are still living, and even takes our folks' furniture off the floor. It has to watch out too, that it keeps its feet on the carpet, which the debtor also has to pawn. A pity that it allowed that final loan, that penultimate support, but there's nothing to be done. Now all that good money has been spent and for what? Not for us! We're certainly being spoiled! Nothing's going on here, for which I would even stroke a person's head, to get it.

Well and bad: Son Janisch, himself a father, with a son of his own who already cheerfully changes into his uniform, with banners flying it's time to go to battle on the football field, has already removed a small, but important part of the bank's riches, dropping by with a couple of cases of wine and a couple of nice plump lies for the branch manager, lies which have to be washed down with even more alcohol, we'll see each other at our table in the pub. Together with our sons and heirs, no, our house will never die out, we've founded a party for it and wish everyone else all the worst, while we, gossiping, play our own jokes. All of this is my final argument, which is far too impatient to settle down here and now. They're all sneering at this by now veteran party, but they all vote for it. Now are we sitting comfortably? Kurt Janisch (at present senior director of the company House-grab and Son) is already working himself half to death and has taken on two part time jobs as factory security guard in the small town. His father found them for him in his day. Here, where the generations still properly follow one another, tradition still counts for something. And son Ernst, too, the crown prince, has brought the bank, which anyway has a tendency to ampleness, because it so much likes to clear up and then eat the default interest from other people's Christmas trees, which deceptively were only lit up for a week, something as a chaser: The bank can swallow it or not. Ernst doesn't care. This money, too, was finally drunk up, we're not going back to the house, first we have to have the house to go to-and now the money's gone. And the house is not yet really there, that is, it would be, but it looks so far away as if it was about to disappear and take a coffee break before the interest has properly begun to work. A screaming old dear in a hole under the roof means that one's not exactly acclaimed by public opinion, that has to change. Word must not get round. Otherwise payday would come around after all, the parking lot lit up, where it's all supposed to happen and where the other wrecks are already waiting to be towed away. She mustn't go into an old people's home, she must stay here and show a return, until she's nothing more than a transparent rustling mommy, swinging bags of flour to kill rats dancing at night on the hot plate, because the rats want to attack her and she's got nothing else to hand except this white powder, which she secretly stirs into dough, yesyes, the wine's good.

So the agricultural credit bank is sticking out its hand too, no, both hands, and our throat between them. No wonder, when this patient institution is constantly and again and again being told more and more gloomy stories, fortunately all made up, at the same time as more and more riches, which were never there, are depicted. There's someone who's in debt to us, but he doesn't make himself available for the repayment, what can we do? We like to sit in the comfortable colorful easy chairs in the appropriate branch, have fun and look cheerfully at the glace cherries on the frothy abundance (achieved through folding in of quite ordinary air!) of our demands. And then we look out of the window and straight into the window of the cafe, and there they are, the real cakes. Afterwards, full of cholesterol, in our grave, we'll feel better. But we already have to spread optimism around now, while the bank still has to learn how to deal with adolescents, when they have debts the size of future annual salaries with four different telephone companies. We're sticking to more solid assets, says Kurt Janisch and says his son Ernst. One of those bronze turrets on the detached house, that would be tiptop! that would be really smart, would really add something to the house, why don't we just cap it? Exactly: We'll put on a tower as well. We won't put on the matching Spanish boots. The long and the short of it is: The bank wants something every month. The funds are always only in prospect, and there's never a telescope there, so that they finally come closer and look bigger than they are. But that's going to change! There are quite different times coming for the hard-working, the decent, and the able, who want to take power one day, too, they've waited long enough for it and have gathered in a movement which, congealed as a cold fried egg, would at last like to add us, yes indeed, just US! as a toy or a greasy side-dish to an even greasier roast. I wouldn't vote for us, we would be too lazy for everything, war would always follow us, because we possessed no sense of judgement. At some point perhaps it will also acquire manners, this party, but it's not really necessary, because the big money, which sets great store that something like that will board this train anyway, even if still hesitantly, no matter who's driving and where to, but capital always keeps one foot on the ground so it can jump off in time and look for another engine driver. But that's where capital doesn't know our Janischs! Going along with them would have worked out all right the first time. Marx, too, would have written something a bit different, better even, if he had known about them. Admittedly Janisch amp; Co. didn't set up housing mortgage companies for long enough, although people like them in this party certainly did, and fell on their faces with all of them. The companies had to be wound up again, a pity really. Now Messrs. Janisch are trying something else! They want to make their own mistakes, but always ones which others would make too, if they had the chance. Indeed all human qualities are tied up in this community of the like-minded, and this bundle will then fall heavily on all our heads, I can see that already. Well, soon they're going to collect people, they already have the houses. You'll see!

So the funds: But first these have to be snatched from greedy arms and passed on to other greedy arms. The son of the country policeman, however, absolutely must have them right now, so that in association with his father (it's the Association of Austrian Building Society Investors, which has reproduced in full color in its house journal pictures of British country seats or at least of doctors' houses in the Austrian provinces, converted peasant cottages made of beautiful old wood, grown honorably gray without a lick of paint. We'll surely provide our building society investors with this nice little magazine after having taken their billions! Then the Austrians, men and women, will save even more. Interest at less than one percent! We'll move over to shares but still can't sleep anymore. If God created men in his image, why should man not be allowed to design his little house as a likeness of Buckingham Palace?) he can pursue his hobby of collecting houses and plots of land. The branch manager also has a hobby: speculation. The coming bad times have encouraged him to take it up. He is a brave and clever person. But that's a nice hobby, which you've been given there! Other people have to go to play tennis or go to die or go jogging, and indeed the rightful owners of the adjoining properties must die, owners, for whom their property had likewise once been a heartfelt concern, and which lay together like two peaceful villages before finally being gathered together in a cozy residential landscape, large enough to be entered by a country policeman and his son, but not by their families, whom they are also meanwhile fed up to the back teeth with. First they would have died if they hadn't been able to get them, the families, women, and children. And now they no longer fit, because their own demands have grown bigger, and the children too, unfortunately. Now they suddenly need much more! People grow out of their demands and are so stupid as to tend towards violence when they have new ones. We're still there too, unfortunately, a kind of elite, who put garden chairs on their balconies. Please be patient for a moment. One thing at a time, one house at a time, one woman at a time, one setback at a time, in order finally after all to grab the opportunities by the somewhat gray short and curlies. Ouch. The skin comes away, too. I call that the art of war! People die one way or the other, no fear, but their houses remain, unless we were in Kosovo, there it would be the other way round, but no, nothing at all is left there. Nothing of anyone. Whoever can do so wants to leave. Yes, something has to be done with the people, so that they don't rest and rust. They must have enough time, so that they can get their possessions to safety beforehand, before the war starts, which dreamy people have long longed for. They foresaw it, after all! Where is the truck, the tractor, the little horse, now it's time to go over the mountains. Before the properties crumble away, if you please, we'll just take them, if no one else does it. Abandoned property cannot bear the emptiness in itself, it wants to belong to someone again. Up there a horse is lying under the tractor, because they didn't want to take the pass road in proper order one behind the other. Some possessions are too big for any means of transport. If one doesn't take the wheel oneself and steers everything down to the smallest detail, even if it's down to the bottom of the roadside ditch, then someone else will take what belongs to one.

Sometimes it'll be the duties, sometimes a distant relative whom one could not have reckoned with, because one's never heard of him. These two men, Janisch father and son, altogether making the best impression, I can't say any more than that, the first as a country policeman, the other as tamer of telephone lines, to which one has to tap up to the top of tall poles, have discovered a fine method of living, so that property lies down sighing at their feet like a tired dog. Except no one is allowed to visit otherwise it jumps up and bites, as a sign, that the property belongs to us alone.

They pay court to women. Both of them actually. But mainly Janisch senior, the country policeman. That's so easily said, but he has already made so many people in this town and in this part of the country unhappy. Well, would you have guessed it? Preferably women who own houses or apartments in the nearby small town. These female proceedings have to be conducted and intimately handled, even if what the Janischs do is not described like that. They combine the pleasing with the useful. Well.

It's a good thing if one gets around in one's job and the hours are a bit flexible, so that one can go for a wee drive in between. The husbands of these wives should be deceased if possible or never have existed in the first place. There should never have been children present either. Who knows something like that (that a lady has to make an exit at a given moment, otherwise there's one too many around for her property), if not a policeman, priest, neighbor, telephone engineer, or the appropriate grocer, who himself, however, has cast an eye over this emptiness, which in his mind is becoming populated with ever more bricks, until one's heart grows heavy? However, only the margins in retail trade are worth talking about, not actions. This box of tropical fruit must not be knocked over, the ease and naturalness with which the venomous red leaping spider, but no, it's called a crested spider, will hop out, could produce expressions, which would become sights worth seeing. The grocer will never get back the eye he risked. That's the way women are, always the same type for the love command and for the most global project of all, against which environmental pollution and world peace are nothing: marriage. They all want it. Women and marriage, that's the perfect combination, especially in the country, where there aren't many distractions and you soon get enough of them. Marriage follows. It's not possible for a woman to say "thanks, but no thanks." The grocer will have to buy his bananas somewhere else and deliver them somewhere else, the door is shut to him. He hasn't got the faintest idea to whom this door is opened, but it must be to someone. He hasn't seen the woman behind it for weeks now. In the end the niece in Krems will get something she hadn't been expecting, and she'll get it after the aunt's end. It won't have paid off, that the grocer so decently delivered food to the old woman in his car. Others were quicker and there already. The neighbors, too, like to munch along, leftovers, too. They stare at the garbage. The things she throws away, they can still be used! People steal from one another, first out of conviction, then out of love. First they introduce themselves as neighbors and immediately transform themselves into friends, that is, greedy beasts, just as in our dear Balkans, which we meanwhile know better than our own living room, where the place appears on our screens at least four times a day, where neighbors were still neighbors but didn't stay that way. Our own neighbors spur on their apocalyptic steeds, so that this shoving, splashing, dripping flood of old men and women is directed into the bed, which stands in the bedroom, where often the TV doesn't come in. If one doesn't proceed carefully, it may be that one goes under and pleasantly anaesthetized by Anafranil suffocates in one's own shit. Stealing isn't so easy, often it's hard work, otherwise we'd all be doing it.